This site is intended to be a summary of some of my hobbies & pursuits, focusing mostly on the work I did after I left my last job in December 2005. I love data and analysis. I live in Excel. These have mostly been hobbies, but when I left my last job I had a dream to see if I could turn any of the hobbies into "economic sustenance" ("job" did not quite seem to describe it). This was a calculated risk, and after a fair amount of work, they remain in the hobby category. While I still have many, many ideas of how to improve and expand my analyses, and, in hindsight, see how different approaches might have yielded better results, I am grateful for the chance to work on them. And it was, and continues to be, very fun.

My first area of focus was my sports wager models. As you can see in more depth, I have slowly built and revised a model for the NFL over a few years, and it continues to do pretty well (23-8 in 2005 & 2006). It may go south this season, but, so far, it has held up pretty well. This made me wonder if there were other opportunities out there. I worked mostly on the NBA and MLB, building data sets and testing ideas I had or, just to see, once I had the data, if I could find anything that worked. I have not found anything that warrants treating this a plausible replacement to gainful employment. As mentioend above, I have many more ideas for revisions, improvements and new sports, but view this as a hobby, perhaps a money-making one, but still a hobby.

Similar to my sports betting hobby is my interest in analyzing baseball. When I read Moneyball a few years ago, I thought I may have found a calling. I love data, analysis and baseball. I expected their to be a lot of others out there with similar interests and abilities, and those expectations were met. I did some analysis that I was curious about and, I thought, fairly novel in the area the effects of ballparks on team's performances. However, there are many, many people out there who have been doing this a lot longer, and the prospect of landing a job within the few coveted paid positions (not highly paid, either) seemed too remote to invest the effort needed to have a meaningful chance. I tried, but realistically the effort needed to have a realistic shot seemed to be measured in years, not months. So, it remains a hobby.

The investment research is less straightforward data and and analysis. Good investing takes both, but also requires a lot of qualitative thinking and judgment as well. As my investment summary outlines, I have been a pretty successful individual investor without having developed a consistent methodology to find, review and decide upon investments. I used some of my time off to improve that process, hoping that I would discover a methodology that consistently yielded above market returns. This remains a work in progress. I developed more rigor, focusing mostly on stock screening and spending much more time reading analyst and industry reports on stocks (my prior level of due diligence was rather modest), but I cannot say I have found something leading to above average returns. The universe of companies that my filtering yielded have produced, as a group, above average returns, but the subset of stocks I chose to focus on (I avoided industries that I felt it would be difficult to understand), and, in some cases invest in, have performed a bit under the market.